Devices that are used to gather patient monitoring information in emergency medical services (“EMS”) applications, for example defibrillator devices, are often complex and expensive devices, primarily because they serve a very important purpose in an EMS setting, and must be durable, accurate, and reliable. The communications capabilities of such devices are often limited by their hardware, such that users must choose between buying a new defibrillator or continuing to use the same, often slower, communications interfaces available with an older defibrillator. A retrofit solution that involves changing the existing hardware or software of the device may be almost as costly and time-consuming to implement as device replacement itself.
Existing patient monitoring devices store various kinds of information during use. Users wishing to upload or download such information, typically after an incident or after a certain period of time (e.g. at the end of the day or end of the week), are often limited to retrieving only the entire content of the device's memory card, regardless of whether the user is interested in only a specific subset of the entire card's contents. This increases the time necessary for data transfer, as well as the time necessary to sort the data and/or identify the desired subset of the data.